How strange to discover the way I've always felt in a book published in 1970. Our world and its creation, our scientific advances and everything about us in the end are for naught, quite like Ecclesiastes declares. We'll be brought to completion, the Messiah will come, and then a new world will dawn, with its new inhabitants, mission, and its own quest for the Messiah. And so it will happen, time and time again, for eternity.
~
"After what I heard in that courtroom," Abe said, "after learning what people can be made to do to people and after the holocaust seeing it still go on and on, I feel that we are wrecking our world beyond our ability to save ourselves. We have polluted our planet, and the creatures who live on it. I swear to God, and we have destroyed each other. I think we've run out of time, and space, and I think it's not a case of if it is going to happen, it's only a matter of when. And from the way we're behaving, I think God is getting very impatient."
"Oh, God is patient enough," Thomas Bannister said. "You see, we mortals are so pompous that we have deluded ourselves into believing that in all of eternity, and all of the vast universe, that we are the only ones who have undergone the human experience. I've always believed that it's happened here before, on this very earth."
"Here....how...?"
"Well, in God's scheme what is a few billion years, here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen human civilizations in the past billion years that we know nothing about. And after this civilization we are living in destroys itself, it will all start up again in a few hundred million years when the planet has all its messes cleaned up. Then, finally, one of those civilizations, say five billion years from now, will last for eternity because people will treat each other the way they ought to."
~QB VII by Leon Uris, 424-425
3 comments:
I believe I finally read this when I was about 19 (it seems so long ago :P ), and at the time enjoyed it very much; I still like it, but you begin to realize that to some extent, everyone feels this way at some point in their life. When you look around at the world, particularly at situations where "if only people had ___!" situations, you're apt to express similar frustrations. It's picking up from those situations and determining how to encourage people to do just ____ that is the test and task we face.
There is a midrash that Hasehm was "boneh olamos umacharivan," created worlds and destroyed them, because there were things wrong with them. Maybe it was the lack of Shabbos, or something else, but we just don't know. With this midrash we can reconcile science's estimation of the earth as several billion years old, but our calendar is only 5,769 years from creation - there was earlier life, but it was destroyed, and our [current] world was created 5,769 years ago. (Not everyone agrees to thoughts like these, and some in fact consider them to be heretical.)
the linear progression of history is nice, whether its true is a different story
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